March madness….

I’ve been watching basketball. Often, as I’m clicking through channels, I find myself drawn into the final four or five minutes of games between teams I know absolutely nothing about. Teams like Gonzaga, for instance. I had to Google Gonzaga. Now I know that it is in Spokane. Thanks, Google. Go Zags.

When I’m not watching really tall Wisconsin farm boys shoot three pointers or Googling things like “Where is Gonzaga?” I’m cleaning like a lunatic. People who know me who are reading this are thinking, “her house is always clean. Why is she cleaning, for heaven’s sake?” To those people, I say, Hold up. Don’t let those cute orange Dala horses on the windowsill in the sunny breakfast nook fool you. You haven’t seen the shanty Irish places in my house like drawers and the dank hobbit hole of a room where I store paint cans and everything else I don’t want you to see. I’m a fraud. A fraud, I tell you.

And so, to clear my conscience and my head and get ready for April, I have been unloading junk with what borders on religious fervor. I’ve been in the “I forgot to get dressed because I am cleaning/organizing/tossing/ and no, I didn’t get to the store to pick up milk today” Zone. No, really. This is an actual Zone. One day last week, I stopped moving just long enough to realize that it was after 3 p.m. and I was still in my fuzzy black and turquoise leopard print pajamas because I’d gotten so into what I was doing that I’d forgotten to put on actual clothes or comb the hair that was standing straight up on top of my head like a chicken. I had already hauled the second load of other people’s crap to the garage this way. I was thankful that we don’t live where people who get dressed could witness the spectacle of an old hen in leopard print pajamas and bedroom slippers schlepping garbage bags filled with flotsam and jetsam down the sidewalk on a Tuesday afternoon in March.

Did you know that flotsam and jetsam are actually two terms that describe types of ship debris? Apparently, the term flotsam is defined as debris that ends up in the water by accident and jetsam describes debris that is deliberately thrown overboard, usually to lighten the load of ships in distress. I plan to share this with our two mostly grown up Easter chicks when they get home and start asking questions as to the whereabouts of their belongings. And then I will tell them to look in the garage where their jetsam bins are stacked.

It feels good to be carrying a lighter load physically and psychologically. To have the luxury of focusing on the mundane and not the massive, acutely aware that others are not so lucky. News updates on the terrible plane crash in the French Alps and the young co-pilot who was responsible for the disaster make me remember just how crazy hard it is to be human. Too much sorting of blame and compassion to muster in March, the month that went out like a lion, windy and raw and full of debris.